Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World

The technology likely to have the greatest impact on the future of the world economy has arrived, and it's not self-driving cars, solar energy, or artificial intelligence. It's called the blockchain. The first generation of the digital revolution brought us the Internet of information. The second generation - powered by blockchain technology - is bringing us the Internet of value: a new, distributed platform that can help us reshape the world of business and transform the old order of human affairs for the better.

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

Best-selling author Ryan Holiday, the acclaimed marketing guru for American Apparel and many bestselling authors and multiplatinum musicians, explains the new rules and provides valuable examples and case studies for aspiring growth hackers. Whether you work for a tiny start-up or a Fortune 500 giant, if you're responsible for building awareness and buzz for a product or service, this is your road map.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

A revelatory examination of how the wildfirelike spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects - for good and for ill. A handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each other online and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design in decades. A midwestern professor of Middle Eastern history starts a blog after 9/11 that becomes essential reading for journalists covering the Iraq war.

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few

In this endlessly fascinating book, New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant. Groups are better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

Billion Dollar Lessons: Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures

In the 1960s, IBM CEO Tom Watson called an executive into his office after his venture lost $10 million. The man assumed he was being fired. Watson told him, "Fired? Hell, I spent $10 million educating you. I just want to be sure you learned the right lessons." In Billion Dollar Lessons, Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui draw on research into more than 750 business failures to reveal the misguided tactics that mire companies over and over.

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change

Companies everywhere face two major challenges today: getting noticed and getting paid. To confront these obstacles, Bharat Anand examines a range of businesses around the world, from The New York Times to The Economist, from Chinese Internet giant Tencent to Scandinavian digital trailblazer Schibsted, and from talent management to the future of education.

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

What do Starbucks and JetBlue and KrispyKreme and Apple and DutchBoy and Kensington and Zespri and Hard Candy have that you don't? How do they continue to confound critics and achieve spectacular growth, leaving behind former tried-and true brands to gasp their last? Face it, the checklist of tired P's marketers have used for decades to get their product noticed - Pricing, Promotion, Publicity, to name a few - aren't working anymore.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism

In this provocative new book, Rifkin argues that the coming together of the Communication Internet with the fledgling Energy Internet and Logistics Internet in a seamless twenty-first-century intelligent infrastructure—the Internet of Things—is boosting productivity to the point where the marginal cost of producing many goods and services is nearly zero, making them essentially free.

Crowdsourcing: The Coming Big Bang of Business and How It Will Change Your World

"Crowdsourcing" describes the process by which the power of the many can be used to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few. Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today's technology, liberating the potential within us all. It's a perfect meritocracy, where age, education, and job history no longer matter. If you can perform the service, design the product, or solve the problem, you've got the job.

Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World

In this new age of networked intelligence, businesses and communities are bypassing crumbling institutions. We are altering the way our financial institutions and governments operate; how we educate our children; and how the health care, newspaper, and energy industries serve their customers. Once again backed by original research, Tapscott and Williams provide vivid, new examples of organizations that are successfully embracing the principles of wikinomics.

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science

In this sharp, masterfully argued book, Dani Rodrik, a leading critic from within, takes a close look at economics to examine when it falls short and when it works, to give a surprisingly upbeat account of the discipline. Drawing on the history of the field and his deep experience as a practitioner, Rodrik argues that economics can be a powerful tool that improves the world - but only when economists abandon universal theories and focus on getting the context right.

Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built

In just a decade and a half, Jack Ma, a man from modest beginnings who started out as an English teacher, founded Alibaba and built it into one of the world's largest companies, an e-commerce empire on which hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers depend. Alibaba's $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the largest global IPO ever. A Rockefeller of his age who is courted by CEOs and presidents around the world, Jack is an icon for China's booming private sector.

Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Why do some products get more word of mouth than others? Why does some online content go viral? Word of mouth makes products, ideas, and behaviors catch on. It's more influential than advertising and far more effective. Can you create word of mouth for your product or idea? According to Berger, you can. Whether you operate a neighborhood restaurant, a corporation with hundreds of employees, or are running for a local office for the first time, the steps that can help your product or idea become viral are the same.

Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less

In Scaling Up Excellence, best-selling author Robert Sutton and Stanford colleague Huggy Rao tackle a challenge that determines every organization’s success: scaling up further, faster, and more effectively as a program or an organization creates a larger footprint. Sutton and Rao have devoted much of the last decade to uncovering what it takes to build and uncover pockets of exemplary performance, to help spread them, and to keep recharging organizations with ever-better work practices.

Raphael F. Fontes says:"A must read for all high growth organizations."

Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals

First published in 1971, Rules for Radicals is Saul Alinsky's impassioned counsel to young radicals on how to effect constructive social change and know "the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one."

Google Executive Chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt and former SVP of Products Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google over a decade ago as proven technology executives. At the time, the company was already well-known for doing things differently, reflecting the visionary - and frequently contrarian - principles of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. If Eric and Jonathan were going to succeed, they realized they would have to relearn everything they thought they knew about management and business.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives - from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture - can be understood as the result of a few long-term accelerating forces.

Publisher's Summary

In just the last few years, traditional collaboration in a meeting room, on a conference call, and even in a convention center has been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale.

Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the burgeoning growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success.

A brilliant guide to one of the most profound changes of our time, Wikinomics challenges our most deeply rooted assumptions about business and will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand competitiveness in the 21st century.

Based on a $9-million research project led by best-selling author Don Tapscott, Wikinomics shows how masses of people can participate in the economy like never before. They are creating TV news stories, sequencing genomes, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding cures for disease, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, and even building motorcycles. You'll read about:

Rob McEwen, the Goldcorp, Inc., CEO who used open-source tactics and an online competition to save his company and breathe new life into an old-fashioned industry.

Flickr, Second Life, YouTube, and other thriving online communities that transcend social networking to pioneer a new form of collaborative production.

Mature companies, like Procter & Gamble, that cultivate nimble, trust-based relationships with external collaborators to form vibrant business ecosystems.

An important look into the future, Wikinomics will be your road map for doing business in the 21st century.

This book contains some interesting concepts to which I was happy to be introduced and some great stories, mostly from the worlds of business and academia, that illustrate and flesh out the concepts. It is also, unfortunately, tedious and repetitive. A good editor could shorten it by half and vastly improve it by doing so.

The content of the book is excellent, especially for executives not really clued into the wikiness of the tech world. But the narrator, who has a beautiful and strong speaking voice, is so forceful with every sentence, one would think the book is a series of proclamations on how wiki will save the world. As a result the book's message and content began to seem redundant after Chapter 2. Less would have been more in this case.

I was expecting a lot more from this book. If you're looking for something insightful and interesting to listen to, I would suggest either "Freakonomics" or "The World is Flat".

"Wikinomics" blathers on and on about an open-source revolution, and companies that do not embrace the open-source movement will ultimately lose out. I personally would like to believe this, and perhaps there is evidence to really support this general claim, but you will not find it in this book. The author does point out wikipedia and linux and a few other success stories, but these are already very well documented; the author would have you believe he's really pulling back the curtains to show you a world out there that people don't already know about.

The narrator isn't the best, but even an amazing narrator couldn't make this book interesting. The tone of the book is often preachy. This author will not keep your interest beyond the opening passage. A very dull and uninspired book.

Absolutely nothing new here. Tapscott seems to wait for the latest trends to pass and then writes about them as if they are new. If you've heard of Flickr, YouTube or Facebook, you already know what's in this book.

I heard the author speak at a conference recently and he was/is a super speaker, but this book.....

I am half way through the book now and am finding it a bit slow and heavy on words and opinions but light on examples and cases. There's certainly some good stuff in the material, I was just expecting more.

I purchased this book, as well as Crowdsourcing, the latter of which is the much of the same subject matter, but from 2008, instead of 2007.

The narrator of Crowdsourcing is also much better, with the Wikinomics narrator sounding like he had to take smoke break every 10 minutes, having the raspy voice of a 60 year old chain smoker. Not exactly the sound of a young technology writer. His emphasis when reading is also so measured, it sounds like he's narrating a 1960s PBS documentary. He has no relationship to the material: he actually almost breaks into laughter as he says "Web 2.0".

It explores how some companies in the early 21st century used mass collaboration (or peer production) and open-source technology such as wikis to be successful. According to Tapscott wikinomics is based on four ideas: Openness, Peering, Sharing, and Acting Globally. The use of mass collaboration in a business environment, in recent history, can be seen as an extension of the trend in business to outsource: externalize formerly internal business functions to other business entities. The difference however is that instead of an organized business body brought into being specifically for a unique function, mass collaboration relies on free individual agents to come together and cooperate to improve a given operation or solve a problem. This kind of outsourcing is also referred as crowdsourcing, to reflect this difference. This can be incentivized by a reward system, though it is not required.

While, there are some interesting examples and some valuable insights, the book is far from being a critical study. Even when it is insightful, it is like listening to people smoking pot. Every idea is clever as long as nobody is sober.

The section on Sharing is toothless in examining the implications of the loss of property rights. Real companies should be real careful about drinking this exuberant koolaid. But don't take any of it too seriously - if the authors believed what they were saying, then why didn't they just blog the book for free and make money from "incentives"?

In fact, here is a Godelian puzzle to ponder:
The last chapter will be written by viewers, and was opened for editing on February 5, 2007. So, if the authors truly believed what they are saying in the first chapters that are not open for editing, then why wouldn't they let the wisdom of the crowd edit the first part as well?

If you are going to read this, then please also read The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen.

By the way, the first paragraph of my review was lifted from wikipedia.

The book looks at Wikipedia and a cluster of other very recent open source success as though this were a wild new idea with little or no precedence. The result is almost propagandistic.

A longer term perspective that looked at GNU (a precursor to Linux from the early ‘80s) and professional societies (a very early kind of open sourcing) would have revealed more weighty questions. Most open-source movements have largely failed, especially in computing. Even Linux is starting to seriously lag the state of the art. Reading this book creates the opposite impression.

Wikipedia is amazing; it is changing the world. But why? And will it last? Is it representative? Is it even the right story or is the destruction of Britannica the important story?

I suspect that in the future open source will be primarily a tool that businesses use to compete with each other, with results that are as often destructive as creative. But this book doesn’t even create a framework for discussing this possibility.

Thought provoking.. One of the most eye opening technology books out there! Don’t let the name of put you off .. I thought I understood the internet , well I now have an understanding of true collaboration in the globe market .. If you have enjoyed books like : The world is flat or the Innovators Solution or What’s Next . This book will help pull it all together..
Awesome
Steve

In the future, people (mainly youngsters) and forward-looking corporations will collaborate and accomplish amazing things. There, I just saved you 13 hours of listening to this book. Talk about having one idea and beating it to death over and over and over. Also, the narrator uses the same inflection for every single sentence he reads making it just that much more painful to listen to. My advice: skip this book.